Thing Things Thursday: Robot Jobs

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been playing with Claude Code and building little applications that solve very particular problems. A few people have asked me what I’ve been using Claude Code for and how it’s gone. Last week, I built a little semantic search application for the first 23 volumes of North Dakota Quarterly. This was in the service of an article for the Edinburgh Companion to the Regional Magazine. I talked about what I did in last week’s Three Things Thursday. What is remarkable to me is that it has worked consistently enough to be a real help in my research (which is largely done, but I’ve benefited from the ease with which I’ve been able to cross check my conclusions against articles from the Quarterly). The goal is eventually process all the volumes from NDQ so that I have a searchable database of all articles from 90+ volumes. This will take some time (and some tokens), but now that the prototype is built, all I need to do is feed it the scans. In a perfect world, I…